NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT (59 W) vs Sparkle GeForce 8600 GT Passive 1GB (SF-PX86GT1024U2-HP Passive)

The GeForce 9600 GT (59 W) card has twice as many ROPs and higher graphics clock rate, consequently its pixel fillrate is considerably higher. Better pixel fill rate allows more pixels to be drawn on screen per second, which results in increased performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

The maximum texture fillrate depends on the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and graphics frequency. The NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT (59 W) has an edge here, because not only it runs at higher frequency, but it also has twice as many Texture Mapping Units (TMUs). Better maximum texture fill rate means that the GPU can apply more textures and/or utilize more complex 3D effects for each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

Maximum Single Precision performance shows how good the card is at executing programs, that process primarily single-precision floating point data. The performance is measured in GFLOPS or billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second. All single-precision calculations are performed by stream processors or CUDA cores, as such the more cores / processors the graphics card has the better. Performance also depends on the processor clock rate. The GeForce 9600 GT (59 W) is substantially faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. Memory type, speed, and memory interface width all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT (59 W) is due to better and higher clocked memory, and wider bus interface.